“Look, as I told him when I talked to him in Tampa, we need him,” Steinbrenner said. “We do. That’s just obvious. We’ve still got our injuries, and my hope is that he comes back and continues to improve and stay healthy.”

“(It’s) horrible,” Cuban said. “I think it’s disgraceful what Major League Baseball is trying to do to him. Look, it’s not that he doesn’t deserve to be suspended. He does … (211 games), that’s personal.”

This will be the third lockout in the Gary Bettman era. The commissioner, who gets booed every time he hands out the Stanley Cup, was hired by the NHL’s owners in 1993. One of the tenets of his hiring was to avoid work stoppages.

Even those who don’t follow baseball closely had to notice, if only because the figures were so startling. Jayson Werth is a decent enough outfielder, but giving him $126 million over seven years seems unfathomable.